BMB Weekly #46: November 21, 2025

 

BMB Spotlight: Chinedum Udekwu

Chinedum Udekwu is a familiar face in the halls of BMB, conducting cutting-edge cancer research in lab of department chair Olorunseun Ogunwobi. This year, you'll also find him representing the biochemistry community at MSU's Council of Graduate Students.
Read the full article here.

 

 

 

Ruey-Hwa Chen from the Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica Taipei, Taiwan will be presenting the lecture titled "Purinosome: assembly mechanisms and biological functions".

To join us on Zoom, click this link. Password: bmbseminar

The Fall BMB Seminar Series will run through December 4, 2025. The complete schedule is available on the BMB Fall Seminar Series website. If you are interested in meeting with any of these speakers please email Leslie Williams, glady@msu.edu. Many speakers are planning to visit in-person. A Zoom option will continue to be offered for all seminars.

 

During our Season of GRADitude, MSU faculty, staff, and students are invited to share a story about an MSU graduate student and why they are grateful for them. The MSU community is invited to vote for their favorite story, as the top five stories with the most votes will be celebrated, and both the nominator and the student will receive a $50 prize. Nominate a student here.

An electronic dance music experience as a collaboration between the MSU Museum and the cadre booking collective. Experience the Museum’s Physical Spells [The Wor(l)d in the Atom] exhibition and an energetic live performance! Featured DJs: 4dmort3m, leadbuyexample, Dig, and JaneofArc. Please note that this is an alcohol-free event. Nonprofit to fundraise for: Trumbullplex. Learn more and register here.

Join us for MPS speaker Laura Gunn from Cornell University. The seminar will be held at 4:00 p.m.

Laura’s talk is titled “Harnessing Nature’s Solutions for More Efficient Biology CO2 Carbon Capture”. We would like to invite graduate students and postdocs to join the speaker for a lunch and discussion on Monday, November 24th. Lunch will be provided at 12:00 p.m. in PBL 168. This is a great opportunity to meet our outside speaker in an informal environment. If you would like to participate in the luncheon, please RSVP to Keri Morris at morrisk@msu.edu with any dietary restrictions by Friday November 21, 2025 at 1 p.m. All students and post docs who are interested in this week’s seminar topic are welcome to attend. You do not need to be in the MPS program or affiliated with an MPS faculty member.

Attend this seminar via Zoom. Passcode: 028299

Are you having a hard time getting things off your to do list? Would you benefit from a dedicated space and being around others to find motivation and productivity? If so, please join us in a structured community space for supporting goal achievement. We will start at 2pm with a brief time of connecting and sharing goals. We will then have two sessions of about 50-60 minutes where everyone will work on their individual goals with a 10-minute break in between. You can come for one or both sessions or just stop in at any point. Learn more here.

COGS wants to help spread the word about this annual celebration meal! ALL are invited to join in community and celebration — a moment to share food, stories, and unity across cultures and identities. The Office of Multicultural Enrichment and Advocacy (OMEA) hosts this highly anticipated event!  RSVP here to reserve your spot! Bring your family and friends! If you wish to volunteer at this event, you may sign up with the same RSVP form. Learn more here.

This highly regarded two-day webinar is designed for those who have some experience with grant writing. Participants will receive a copy of The Grant Application Writer’s Workbook, which has been written to complement and extend the webinar. The presenter is John D. Robertson, managing member of the Grant Writers’ Seminars & Workshops, LLC. The cost to attend is $95 and includes a copy of your agency-specific workbook. The Graduate School and COGS will pay $75 of the $95 fee for a limited number of doctoral students to attend. This seminar is appropriate for doctoral students who have had some exposure to writing grant applications, either through training, mentoring, or personal experience. Learn more here.

 

The Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Collaboration, Learning, and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Michigan State University is excited to announce the launch of its Graduate Student Affiliate Program. This new initiative is designed to support early-career scholars who are eager to deepen their engagement with interdisciplinarity, connect with a community of peers, and strengthen their professional development. Learn more and apply here.

The Graduate Employees Union and Michigan State University agreed to add 500 additional tuition credits to the tuition waiver benefit for teaching assistants. This additional benefit will be in place for 2024-2028. The Spring tuition pool is available to students appointed as teaching assistants in Spring 2026. Learn more and apply here.

The MSU Bouchet Society chapter seeks to develop and cultivate a network of preeminent scholars who exemplify academic and personal excellence, foster environments of support, and serve as examples of scholarship, leadership, character, service, and advocacy for students who have been traditionally underrepresented in the academy. Learn more and apply here.

Nominations are being accepted for the 2026 MAGS Excellence in Teaching Award competition. This Teaching Award is very competitive, so we are looking for exceptional Ph.D. and Master’s students with great demonstration of teaching competence and knowledge of pedagogy, innovative teaching/instructional design, effective mentoring skills, and commitment to teaching professional development. Learn more about criteria and the nomination process using this link.

 

The Graduate Employees Union (GEU) at MSU invites international students to join their Union: "International students are a major component of our graduate school community. In order to ensure safe, equitable, and just working conditions for all, international student perspectives and membership are crucial! If you or anyone you know is interested in joining our union or participating in the international committee, contact international@geuatmsu.org to learn more." 

The Evidence Driven Learning Innovation (EDLI) team is seeking graduate students, particularly those with teaching responsibilities, to participate in a research study exploring how NeuroSupport GPT, a custom AI tool, can help instructors gain knowledge and implement inclusive teaching strategies for neurodivergent students. This project supports MSU instructors in strengthening their knowledge and enhancing inclusive teaching practices — especially when working with students with disabilities and neurodiverse learners. Learn more and apply here.

You can find the latest department news over on LinkedIn and BlueSky. Give us a follow and be sure to tag us with research updates, publications, and lab updates to help spread the word!

The MSU Student Food Bank is a resource available to students and scholars who may be experiencing food insecurity. The Food Bank provides free food and other essential items to those in need within our MSU community. Learn more here.

 

The Department of Botany and Plant Sciences at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) invites applicants for a tenure-track faculty position at the Assistant level in horticulture. We seek researchers who use genomic, biotechnological, and/or physiological approaches to address important topics in horticulture. The anticipated start date for this position is July 1, 2026. We are particularly interested in candidates whose research connects fundamental discovery with practical advances in horticulture.

Research that improves productivity, stress tolerance, post-harvest physiology, reproductive physiology, and environmental and economic sustainability is especially encouraged. Complementary areas of interest include: development of new cultivars, applications of genomics to trait discovery and approaches to link genotype with phenotype, gene editing or synthetic biology to accelerate cultivar development and neodomestication, urban landscape revitalization, regenerative agriculture, controlled environment agriculture, and precision/digital horticulture, among others. Learn more and apply here.

Michigan State University's Plant Resilience Institute (PRI) is seeking a highly motivated and skilled postdoctoral researcher to lead a project focused on discovering a new class of regulatory metabolites and their nuclear signaling mechanisms that govern plant resilience. The project integrates bioinformatics, molecular genetics, protein structural prediction, and experimental validation to investigate their roles in gene regulation and stress response. The postdoctoral researcher will lean efforts in gene characterization, reverse genetics and ligand screening using phenotyping and molecular genetic approaches. This is a unique opportunity to contribute to conceptual advances in plant stress hormone biology, while building tools and resources of broad utility to the plant science community. The successful candidate will join a highly interdisciplinary team led by Dr. Gregg Howe, with collaborators across PRI. Learn more about this MSU Careers posting here.

 

 

Cho, H., Choi, I., Bouain, N., Nawaz, A., Zheng, L., Shahzad, Z., Brandizzi, F., Rhee, S. Y., & Rouached, H. (2025). Phosphorus availability controls flowering time through subcellular reprogramming of bGLU25 and GRP7 in Arabidopsis. Developmental cell, S1534-5807(25)00635-5. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.devcel.2025.10.005

Fan, Y., Noble, D. W. A., Medlyn, B. E., Monson, R. K., Sage, R. F., Smith, N. G., Ainsworth, E. A., Busch, F. A., Danila, F. R., Ermakova, M., Friesen, P., Furbank, R. T., Gan, S. H., Ghannoum, O., Griffith, D. M., Gu, L., Jacob, V., Knauer, J., Leakey, A. D. B., Li, S., … Way, D. A. (2025). Environmental factors have a greater influence on photosynthetic capacity in C4 plants than biochemical subtypes or growth forms. The New phytologist, 248(3), 1205–1224. https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.70525

Jeon, H. M., Eun, J., Kim, K. H., & Kim, Y. (2025). Cryo-EM structures of human OAT1 reveal drug binding and inhibition mechanisms. Structure (London, England : 1993), 33(11), 1856–1866.e5. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.str.2025.07.019

Keng, M., & Merz, K. M., Jr (2025). PEAS: An Application for Autonomous Precision Conformation Sampling. Journal of chemical information and modeling, 10.1021/acs.jcim.5c02104. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jcim.5c02104

Kokarakis, E. J., Santos-Merino, M., Ghaffarinasab, S., Vocelle, D., & Ducat, D. C. (2025). Engineering quorum-sensing circuits in Synechococcus elongatus PCC 7942 towards self-inducible systems. Metabolic engineering, 92, 76–89. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ymben.2025.07.008

Prado, K., Xue, B., Johnson, J. E., Field, S., Stata, M., Hawkins, C. L., Hsia, R. C., Liu, H., Cheng, S., & Rhee, S. Y. (2025). Photosynthetic acclimation is a key contributor to exponential growth of a desert plant in Death Valley summer. Current biology : CB, S0960-9822(25)01312-0. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.10.004

Ying S. (2025). Get the ball rolling: update and perspective on the role of chloroplast plastoglobule-associated proteins under abiotic stress. Journal of experimental botany, 76(17), 4735–4744. https://doi.org/10.1093/jxb/eraf011

Zuo, Z., Weraduwage, S. M., Huang, T., & Sharkey, T. D. (2025). How volatile isoprenoids improve plant thermotolerance. Trends in plant science, 30(11), 1237–1250. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tplants.2025.05.004

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